Romney Defends Jobs Record

By

Sara Murray

July 25, 2011

Republican Mitt Romney bills himself as a business-savvy job creator, but his presidential campaign will have to contend with the fact that Massachusetts ranked 47th in job creation during his tenure as governor.

Nonfarm payrolls increased roughly 1% in Massachusetts between January 2003 and January 2007, the dates Mr. Romney was in office. The only states to experience slower growth in that period were Michigan, Ohio and Louisiana, which was recovering from Hurricane Katrina.

Massachusetts also lost 4.6% of its population between 2000 and 2006 in a migration spurred partly by poor labor markets and high home prices in the Northeast.

The lackluster Massachusetts record has left an opening for opponents to criticize Mr. Romney's capacity to create jobs.

"We want somebody who is able to go up against President [Barack] Obama who actually has some credibility when it comes to job creation," said Republican presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor, on a recent stop in Salt Lake City.

"After failing to create jobs in Massachusetts, Romney wants to bring his brand of failed economic leadership to the rest of the country by doubling down on the failed economic policies that brought our economy to its knees," said the Democratic National Committee in a recent statement.

The Romney campaign notes that jobs still grew and the unemployment rate dropped under his administration. "Mitt Romney spent 25 years as an entrepreneur and businessman in the real world economy and understands what it takes to create good jobs," said Andrea Saul, a spokeswoman for the Romney campaign. "Americans live every day with the hard reality of President Obama's failed economic leadership. Mitt Romney will get America working again," she said.

With unemployment at 9.2%, and expected to remain elevated, the debate over policies for stimulating job growth has been virtually the only issue of the Romney campaign. The former governor's strategy has been to ignore the other Republicans in the race and wage a general-election campaign with near-daily attacks on Mr. Obama's economic stewardship.

The Obama campaign and Democratic Party have fired back with salvos of their own on Mr. Romney's jobs record. Last week, as Mr. Romney attended a Nascar race, the DNC produced a web video with a race car emblazoned with the number 47.

Economic experts in the state are less inclined to lay blame on Mr. Romney. "The reality of that [job-creation] number was really the larger economic forces," said Michael Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, a business-backed research group.

Mr. Romney took office on the heels of a recession that burst the technology bubble. About 9% of Massachusetts's jobs were in high-tech fields in 2000, compared with 5% nationwide. Manufacturing was also hit hard, shedding 37,600 workers during Mr. Romney's term, an 11% decline.

With fewer residents hunting for jobs, unemployment fell to 4.6% by January 2007, when Mr. Romney left office, from 5.6% when he took office.

Some of that improvement came from hiring. Massachusetts employers added 45,800 jobs from January 2003 to January 2007—job creation Mr. Romney's campaign tends to focus on. Mr. Romney also offered one-stop shopping for businesses dealing with the state's many economic development agencies, and expedited the permitting process.

"That was a major improvement," said Richard Lord, president and chief executive of Associated Industries of Massachusetts, an employer organization.

But some economists and business groups say Mr. Romney did little to lower the high cost of doing business in Massachusetts, and changed the tax code to raise additional revenue that businesses saw as tax increases.

Faced with a projected $3 billion shortfall for fiscal year 2004, Mr. Romney eliminated certain tax preferences, and he made similar changes the following two years. The moves were condemned by businesses. The Obama campaign has questioned why Mr. Romney is opposing a federal deficit-reduction deal that includes business tax-loophole closures when he supported similar moves as governor.

ENLARGE

"We expressed our concern and opposition to those because we were, again, imposing new taxes on companies at a very difficult time," Mr. Lord said.

Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston, said Mr. Romney's tenure lacked a broad economic strategy to remain competitive with other states or to lower business costs.

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